Excellence in Advertising: Lyndon B. Johnson

    1 of 6 2 of 6

      Before God invented Netflix and PVRs, you had to sit through a battery of commercials every time you turned on the idiot box. Most of them made you wonder why the hell Philo Taylor Farnsworth didn’t also invent something to block out commercials. Like Netflix or PVRs. 

      But occasionally, a television ad struck gold to where you’d sit through a seven-hour Cannon marathon to see it again. And now, thanks to the magic of YouTube (which we can thank God for inventing) you can relive the magic at the touch of a mouse. Here’s today’s nomination for Excellence in Advertising.

      When you're trying to convince a nation to give you its votes, sometimes subtlety goes right out the window. Lyndon Baines Johnson was never all that subtle to begin with, but during the 1964 presidential race, LBJ's campaign ran a series of attack ads suggesting that a vote for his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, was a vote for nuclear war. The most famous of these TV spots featured a young girl (three-year-old Monique "Cozy" Corzilius) plucking petals off a daisy, and... well, watch it for yourself:

      The "Daisy" spot (officially titled "Peace, Little Girl"), created by the real-life "mad men" at Doyle Dane Bernbach, only aired once before it was pulled amid criticism that it distorted Goldwater's position and exploited the fears of the voting public. Goldwater himself was, as you might imagine, not impressed: "The homes of America are horrified and the intelligence of Americans is insulted by weird television advertising by which this administration threatens the end of the world unless all-wise Lyndon is given the nation for his very own."

      In retrospect, the message of the ad seems deeply ironic. "These are the stakes," Johnson declares in the voice-over. "To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." Keep in mind that this is the same man who escalated the war in Vietnam, wiping hundreds of thousands of God's children, including plenty of bright-eyed young Americans, from the face of the Earth. LBJ might have been against nukes, but he was clearly not above using conventional bombs, as in Operation Rolling Thunder, which killed upwards of 182,000 North Vietnamese civilians.

      Such was the "Daisy" ad's impact that political campaigns are still copying it today. Two examples: 

      LBJ's 1964 campaign produced several other TV spots on the topic of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Each featured a little girl and ended with the call to action "Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home." Although it is, of course, perfectly innocent, the ice-cream one looks particularly demented through the lens of the 21st century.

      Comments